Currently, users may employ client devices such as personal computers (PCs), PDA's, smartphones, etc. with access to wide area networks, e.g., the Internet, to share content from various online services. Using a PC, a user may access content and services including, but not limited to, music and video downloads, photo sharing, and information access, e.g., news, weather, sports, financial content, etc. Additionally, providers of content and services allow users to create personal profiles to indicate preferences with regarding to the content and services that they wish to receive, as well as from communities of users for the exchange of content and services.
In addition to the growth in the use of networked personal computing devices, there has also been significant growth in the deployment of local area networks that provide computing devices with access to wide area networks, for example, a local area network within the home connected to a wide area network such as the Internet to provide computing devices within the home with access to the Internet in addition to local resources. Similarly, there has been significant growth in the deployment of media access devices, such as digital media adapters, set-top boxes, Internet appliances, etc., which are also connected to local area networks. There is currently no way, however, to extend access to content and services from a variety of sources to popular media access devices in a seamless manner. Furthermore, there are no systems or techniques for extending access to content and services from a variety of sources while retaining user preferences and community identity.
With the proliferation of content items available on local and remote networks, it has become increasingly difficult for a user to locate particular content items on a display limited UPnP client device where the number of content items exceeds a certain threshold. In the case of devices that support UPnP AV Search, the device or application can search for a specific subset of items based on a set of rules. This inherently limits the number of items that are displayed on the device. In the case of devices or clients that do not support UPnP AV Search, however, this flexibility is not available, making the navigation extremely frustrating to the user.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems, methods and program code that provide enhanced formatting and indexing of content such that a minimum number of choices is required by a user to locate a desired content item, irrespective of the amount of content in the content management system.